Negative publicity is of great concern to consumer organizations, especially when the negative publicity is accessible to the public via a network. One particular form of negative publicity is misinformation, which includes unintentionally posted incorrect data, maliciously posted incorrect data (referred to as “disinformation”), and private data (i.e. data that is inadvertently disclosed, such as reduced prices provided to special customers, for example).
In addition to reducing a given organization's popularity, misinformation can mislead customers. For example, an incorrectly posted URL for a particular company will prevent consumers from accessing the company's website. As another example, a false report regarding faulty software can reduce a customer's trust in the company and engender decrease or loss of any good will the company may have built.
Several attempts have been made to develop systems and methods for automated detection of and response to misinformation. For example, virus detection systems, such as the Antivirus product from Symantec, are able to find and eliminate software explicitly designed to disrupt machine and network operations, but do not provide a way of identifying false or misleading data, only dangerous programs.
There are network monitoring systems, such as the Netcool Suite™ from Micromuse Network Solutions, San Francisco, Calif., that are able to identify hardware and software errors as well as operation problems (e.g., network overload,). Another monitoring system called NetRanger™ by Cisco monitors network traffic posting alerts whenever network-based intrusions (e.g., denial-of-service attacks) are detected. Such applications are still not able to identify the presence of misinformation. Web log analysis enables identification of server and network malfunctions, but does not enable the detection of misinformation. Search engines (e.g., Google) have been be used to retrieve postings from multiple sources (e.g., web sites, newsgroups and chat groups) relevant to a particular topic (e.g., “IBM spamming spammers”), but do not enable the identification of misinformation.
Chat group moderators are able to monitor all activity and content within their chat group, but have no means of determining whether changes in local activity patterns are due to misinformation. Corporate public relations and branding specialists are able to determine whether a given statement/article is misinformation, but they have no way to be quickly and automatically notified by one of their organization's network servers of instances of potential misinformation. Buzz detection systems, such as those provided by IBM's WebFountain™ are able to estimate and characterize the public's reaction to a given product by reviewing and comparing both structured (e.g., web pages) and unstructured data (e.g., chat room conversations) related to the given product. Such systems do not provide a way of identifying and providing notification of misinformation.